No, I’m saying that we know black people are less likely to trust the police than white people are, and so it seems reasonable that they might also trust the courts less too. That doesn’t imply some supervillain-like love of crime.

I wonder if there’s actually some truth to his claim. The experience of blacks with the justice system is quite different than that of whites, so I wouldn’t be surprised if their attitude towards a candidate with felony convictions would also be different. Perhaps they’re more likely to believe the narrative of an unfair prosecution than white people are.

I’m not old and I think I might forget some of the words, especially since I would be so anxious.

I don’t know if I would call this ruling a mistake since I’m not an expert in matters of standing, but I regret that the court will not act against a serious threat to free speech. Members of both parties have made statements directed at social media companies which I consider well over the line between a request and a threat.

Not the same thing, but I still have my old Voodoo 2 3D-accelerator card (not the same thing as a video card back then).

I have no idea why the USA spends money on training international students until they get their PhD and then doesn’t automatically give them permanent residency. One guy I know came from Iran to get his physics PhD and although he has managed to stay in the USA with a work visa, by default the USA would have sent him back to Iran!

Dibs on being the palm tree.

…and why do kids these days say ooh-wooh?

For journalists, it raises a question: Should a public official’s family be held to the same standards as that official themselves?

Bullshit. It raises the question: Should a Supreme Court Justice be believed unconditionally when he offers an excuse for what really looks like inappropriate bias? The discovery that another flag associated with the January 6 attack flew in front of Alito’s beach house has shown that the NYT was correct not to accept his story about his wife. I’m honestly surprised by the discussion of how a judge’s family is expected to behave - it’s as if a dead body was found in Alito’s house, he said that he had no idea how it got there, and the press started talking about whether or not he had a responsibility to monitor access to his property more closely.

When I was in California, I saw perfectly peeled lemons lying under a friend’s lemon tree. He told me the rats did it - they ate the peel but were very careful not to bite into the sour inside.

buying bottled water

perfectly good pond in background

The dolphin was diagnosed only a few weeks ago, but it died over two years ago in March 2022.

I also responded, “So, you are saying that property rights have priority over human rights?”

In this vein, I enter another definition of “trespassing” as “an unlawful act committed on the person, property, or rights of another.”

When university presidents and chancellors call in campus or municipal police officers to dismantle peaceful tent encampments and arrest demonstrators, they commit trespass against “the person” and their First Amendment right to “freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Not quite at the Sovereign Citizen level of legal misunderstand but getting there…

There are already solid-red states with no blue urban areas. I suppose it’s technically true that people die in these states (all humans are mortal) but the implication that everyone there except rich landowners is likely to die prematurely is ridiculous.

This claim that the frozen embryos should be considered children according to Texas law has been thrown out repeatedly by Texas courts. It’s almost certainly not going anywhere.

The same thing that already happens to most of them now, I suppose: their basic rights are protected by the Constitution but if they want to live in a community that welcomes them then they might need to move. In the specific situation this article is about, the queer people in eastern Oregon would have to deal with the same issues that the queer people in Idaho already deal with.

In general, I sympathize with the desire to rescue people from the customs of their community, but I don’t think that doing so by imposing our customs on their community is a good idea except in the most extreme cases. It violates the golden rule: I wouldn’t want outsiders imposing their customs on me, even if someone in my community was being mistreated according to the customs of those outsiders. It also doesn’t seem to work very well in practice. It has failed in extreme cases like the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and I fear that it is currently failing in the USA.

Democracy works well when people have similar general goals and just disagree about how to accomplish them. It doesn’t work well when people have opposing goals. Thus I have a lot of sympathy for these people even though I disagree with their politics. Why should they have to follow the rules set by culturally dissimilar coastal cities far away rather than the rules set by much more similar and much closer Idaho?

If I could remake the US government from scratch, I think I might create something like the self-governing cities of medieval Europe. The Democratic/Republican divide is largely an urban/rural one, and this way both the urban and the rural areas would have the local governments and the representatives that the majority wanted. Real-world state lines do a poor job of demarcating regions where most of the people have similar values. A better system is possible, but in practice there’s too much inertia to make such large changes.

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

Another Supreme Court wife causing trouble, eh?

I assume the genie’s rule is “if I help you, I help him twice as much” rather than simply “I do to him twice as much of exactly the same thing I did to you” because otherwise it’s way too easy to kill the other guy while helping yourself.

I think that this is an attempt at a joke rather than something he actually did. He probably enjoys reading about how angry his political opponents are about it.